19 Jun 2014

Super Sport 250

WORLD PREMIER!!! You saw it here first. This is the cool new concept bike from Dutch company Super Motor co.The Super Sport 125 and the Super Sport 250. Can't wait to ride this little thing! The bike in the pictures is the 250.

Developing a bike in China; The story of Lucky Punk...

Building
a bike in china. How hard can it be. A production prototype. Eat your
hart out. 1 1/2 half years ago I did a photoshop mock up of a bike we
envisioned. Vintage trials kind of looks, but basically a super motard
'avant la lettre'. Light weight and ample power. It ended up with a
weight of 101 KG and a power of 27 BHP. Not too bad though. Of course
these figures are non compliant to any type approval.

Lets go
back to the first sentence and the second. China is a nightmare to work
in. The language barrier is one to take in account but the mentality is
one to ignore. Stupidity and idiocy galore. How do you get things done.
Well you don't. Kafka's paradise. Finding brushes and rollers to make a
seat base out of fibreglass weave and epoxy took us half a day. We've
built this bike in 4 weeks. And that we got it finished in time for the
Canton fair, where we were to present this bike to the international
motorcycle trade, was a miracle.

Since we've been producing
and selling a cub based bike for the last 4 years now we thought we knew
how things are done in the far east. But we didn't. Since our
dependency of our cub based model was too risky we decided to move on
and do a proper city slacker motorcycle with hill climb aspirations. A
mover and a shaker. Literally and figuraly speaking. The first engine
supplied to us was wrong and came without balance shaft. The vibrations
were so intense that it was no fun to ride if you had any fake teeth.
You would have lost them after a minute or so.

Always liked
the concept of a Super Motard. But never got round liking the way it
looked. The basis of this production prototype is a so called dragon
bone frame ( pressed steel back bone) which is widely available in
China. To keep the bike as clean as possible ( I've never actually seen a
production bike this clean) we used a 12V 4.5 Ah Li-ion battery the
size of a pack of cigarettes which is stowed under the seat with the
rest of the electric necessities.

Most difficult on this
build was the fabrication of the exhaust. The factory that was going to
do this pipe was provided by us with CAD drawings of the complete
system. But once we got there and did the first fitment it was all off.
Do not know why the Chinese do not stick to the drawings. In the end it
took us 2 days to get it right. Accompanied by lots of swearing and a
bucket load of incomprehension. But the result was spot on. It is a
matter of getting on the same page asap.

We are friends for
life though with the people of the paint factory. Unbelievably skilled
and the only ones we encountered that did have a sense of perfection.
They let us mix our own color by hand. They gave the tank extra rub
downs till they were happy with the result. We changed the color several
times, no problem. Great and easy to work with, taken in account we
could not understand each other. Communication with hands and feet.

The
last hurdle was shipping the bike to the fair from Chongqing to
Guangzhou. We arranged to ship the bike by air. The days to follow were
to become one the of the most stressful in my life. The courier lost the
bike. For 3 full days we were unaware where the bike was. We were about
to miss the Fair all together. Upon our own physical arrival in
Guangzhou the bike was still missing. And even at 5 in the afternoon,
the day before the fair, the bike was still lost. Finally a few minutes
later we've got a call the bike was found We picked it up at 4 in
morning the day at the cargo facility of the airport and assembled the
bike on the parking lot in front of the fair.

So we made it.
The bike rolled into the Fair complex just after nine and found a spot
on the booth of Yinxiang Motors ( the factory that produces our cub
based bikes). The next few days we drew a lot of attention with the
bike. Lots of the Chinese did not understand our bike and told us off
about it. FOB price too high bla bla bla. Too expensive to build... etc
etc. Happily we met some like minded enthusiasts from around the world.
Now after the fair we have a line up of 5 distributors from around the
world to work with. So was it worth the stress, agony and total
insanity? Yes it was.As we speak we are working very hard to ready
the bike for production. And of course put it through its paces during
testing. We plan to launch the Super sport 125/250 in Q1 of 2015 with an
indicative consumer price of 2500, - (125 cc) and 3000,- euro (250 cc).

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Lennard Schuurmans is hunting down the good stuff on planet cool to post for you on Bubble Visor. In the spirit of Bubble Visor he started the Barn Fresh Company in 2012. Old fashioned high quality garments. Support this blog and buy his Barn Fresh products.